


The Human Condition

by Iron



Category: Transformers Prime
Genre: Angst, I should be working, PTSD, after-math, why do I do this to myself?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-26
Updated: 2013-03-26
Packaged: 2017-12-06 12:54:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/735942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Iron/pseuds/Iron
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her right ankle has been broken exactly three times. Each time, she has been running. She doesn’t run anymore. </p><p>--</p><p>What comes after isn't always happy-ever-after.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Human Condition

Some days, Raf can’t walk down the street without flinching every time a plane passes overhead. He’s long since memorized the whine of jet engines cutting through the sky, the certain beating tattoo a special-grade military helicopter makes, the warm rumble of a spy ship flying too low. He carries a modified energon gun at his waist. Most days, it feels as effective as a peashooter. 

He can’t stop his flinching when a high-performance engine passes by, the echoing twinges of hope and fear that mix sickeningly in his stomach. His co-workers look sidelong at him when he does it, suspicion only corralled by his excuse of a motor vehicle accident. 

Jack has been dead for ten long years, his bones buried beneath the rubble of a stripped energon mine. 

Fowler is floating through the empty blackness of space, forever frozen in Starscream’s metal grip. 

Miko is lost, even to him, fighting a never ending war. 

They’re separate, in death and life and allegiance. He hasn’t seen his family in thirteen years, hasn’t ridden in a car for ten, hasn’t done so fucking much in so fucking long because he is so damn afraid and broken by a Primus damned war that he was too young to fight and he wants to hate them, all of them… but he can’t. 

They broke him, and he’s lost so many of the pieces that he can’t put himself together again. 

Sometimes he thinks the Autobots did more than the Decepticons. Then he gets an update from Soundwave, and remembers that it’s their fault the bots never left. 

MIKO

There is, beneath her left shoulder blade, a scar only slightly larger than the circumference of a quarter. It is from a bullet. A millimeter to the left and she would be dead. 

Three red lines rake down her ribs, under her right arm, from her armpit to her hipbone. They are the exact width of a Vehicon’s claws. 

Her right ankle has been broken exactly three times. Each time, she has been running. She doesn’t run anymore. 

The third finger on her right hand is gone. It has been replaced by a Cybertronian prosthetic. 

Behind her ear, stretching to the back of her neck, is a burn. It is scarred, pink and shiny, faintly blue in the right light. 

Across her shoulder blades is a tattoo. It stretched from her lower back to her neck, swirls of black-blue ink stark against her pale skin. In the language of a dead species, it says ‘to the lost are my friends; in the shadow of the past I must always move forwards’. 

Miko has not seen Earth in thirty years. Her friends have been dead for twenty. 

When she looks in the mirror, all she can see is the broken reflection of a girl thirty-three years too old. 

 

JACK:

He is dead. His bones are dust beneath stone rubble. 

There is nothing left of him. 

 

FOWLER: 

He did what no Cybertronian had been able to do – Starscream is dead by his hand. 

They never found his.

**Author's Note:**

> I should be working on so much other than this. >P I have a piece to enter in a showing, and a project to finish, another two to start - 
> 
> I thought these were supposed to be the slow months?
> 
> Comments appreciated!


End file.
